Henry VIII (play)

• 1. Introduction

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  Henry VIII, the collaborative play by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, carried a secret for the first decade of its life: its real title was All Is True. The name Henry VIII did not appear in print until the First Folio of 1623. That gap hints at how carefully the play was handled. It touched living memory, royal legitimacy, and the reputations of people whose descendants still held power.

  The play opens with a Prologue urging the audience to be "sad, as we would make ye," and it keeps that promise. Cardinal Wolsey rises and falls. Queen Katherine is put on trial for the legitimacy of her marriage. Anne Bullen ascends to the throne. And at the end, a newborn princess receives a blessing that promises England "a thousand thousand blessings" under her future reign. That princess is the infant Elizabeth, later Elizabeth I.

  But the evening most people remember was not about any of that. On the 29th of June 1613, a cannon fired for a special effect during a performance at the Globe Theatre ignited the thatched roof. The original Globe burned to the ground. One of the most storied buildings in theatrical history was gone before the play it was staging had even run three performances.

• 2. The Fire of 1613

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  One contemporary report noted that Henry VIII had "been acted not passing 2 or 3 times before" when the Globe caught fire. That detail places the destruction almost at the play's premiere. The cannon shot, used for dramatic effect, sent sparks into the thatch above the open-air galleries, and the blaze consumed the building completely.

  The King's Men, Shakespeare's company, were not left without a stage. They moved their performances to the Blackfriars Theatre, their indoor playhouse. That shift carried an irony that contemporary audiences would have caught immediately: the Blackfriars was the actual historical location of Katherine of Aragon's trial before the Legatine Court, the very scene the play dramatises with particular intensity.

  Fifteen years to the day after the fire, on the 29th of June 1628, the King's Men performed Henry VIII at the rebuilt Globe. Among those watching was George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham of that era, no relation to the Duke of Buckingham depicted in the play. Villiers left at the point in the drama when the play's Buckingham was executed. A month later, Villiers himself was assassinated.

• 3. Two Authors, Divided Scenes

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  For nearly two centuries after its publication, Henry VIII was accepted as Shakespeare's work alone. That changed in 1850, when James Spedding, known primarily as an expert on Francis Bacon, raised the possibility that John Fletcher had written a substantial portion of the play. Fletcher was Shakespeare's successor as the principal playwright of the King's Men and is known to have collaborated with Shakespeare on other works.

  Spedding's method was to track eleven-syllable verse lines, a feature he associated with Fletcher's style. A century later, in 1962, Cyrus Hoy reached the same conclusions through a different route: he mapped the distinctive word choices each writer favoured, noting that Fletcher habitually used "ye" for "you" and "em" for "them." The convergence of two independent stylometric approaches gave the collaborative theory considerable force.

  By 1966, scholars Erdman and Fogel could observe that "today a majority of scholars accept the theory of Fletcher's partial authorship, though a sturdy minority deny it." The division that Spedding and Hoy proposed is now generally accepted. Shakespeare is credited with Act I scenes one and two, Act II scenes three and four, part of Act III scene two, and Act V scene one. Fletcher wrote the Prologue, the Epilogue, and the remaining scenes. Whether Fletcher revised Shakespeare's draft or the two men divided the work from the start remains an open question.

• 4. The Sources and Their Silences

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  Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles supplied Shakespeare and Fletcher with most of their material, as they did for Shakespeare's other English history plays. Additional scenes drew on the 1570 edition of Foxe's Book of Martyrs, including Katherine of Aragon's plea before the Legatine Court.

  The playwrights made deliberate choices about what to leave out. The play covers events that unfolded across roughly two decades, but the sequence is compressed and jumbled. Most strikingly, the disgrace and beheading of Anne Boleyn, here spelled Bullen, is carefully absent. The play ends before any of it happens, closing instead on the christening of the future Elizabeth I. The four wives who followed Katherine and Anne are likewise erased from the stage.

  The play handles the treason charges against the Duke of Buckingham with similar caution. It implies the charges were false and manufactured by Wolsey, without stating that directly. These omissions were not accidents. The Tudor and early Stuart court was acutely sensitive to how its recent history was portrayed, and a play that named living descendants and aired old scandals too bluntly could bring serious consequences. The play's alternative title, All Is True, reads differently in that light.

• 5. Dating the Play

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  The 1613 fire provides the strongest evidence for when Henry VIII was written and first staged. Most modern scholars accept that date. Nicholas Rowe, writing in 1709, had already reasoned that the play must postdate 1603 because its praise of Elizabeth and her successor James could only have been written after James took the throne. The discovery and publication of the 1613 fire document, first brought to wider attention by the scholar Thomas Tyrwhitt, appeared to confirm that view.

  Not everyone agreed. Several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars, including Samuel Johnson, Edmond Malone, and James Halliwell-Phillipps, placed the composition before 1603. Malone argued that the extended glorification of Elizabeth suggested she was the intended audience. He pointed out that James "hated her memory," making such lavish praise unlikely under his reign. Malone also mistakenly identified a Stationer's Register entry from the 12th of February 1604 as Shakespeare's play; it was in fact Samuel Rowley's When You See Me You Know Me, published in 1605.

  Halliwell-Phillipps went further, suggesting that the play burned at the Globe in 1613 was an entirely different work. These positions are no longer held by most scholars. The 1613 date fits the pattern of Shakespeare's known collaborations with Fletcher, and plays celebrating Tudor monarchs continued to be performed and published well into the Stuart era.

• 6. Staging and Performance History

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  Henry VIII is believed to have been first performed as part of the ceremonies marking the marriage of Princess Elizabeth in 1612-1613. The play has more stage directions than any other work attributed to Shakespeare, a feature consistent with its unusually elaborate pageantry: coronations, trials, processions, and a christening all pass across the stage.

  One persistent tradition, recorded by John Downes, prompter of the Duke of York's Company from 1662 to 1706, holds that the role of Henry VIII was originally played by John Lowin, who "had his instructions from Mr. Shakespeare himself." If true, Lowin would be a direct link between Shakespeare and the stage. During the Restoration, Sir William Davenant staged a production starring Thomas Betterton, which Samuel Pepys saw. Betterton played Henry in 1664.

  Victorian productions grew elaborate and expensive. Henry Irving chose to play Wolsey at a revival in 1888, with Ellen Terry as Katherine of Aragon. A production opening on the 29th of August 1877 at the Theatre Royal in Manchester, directed by Charles Calvert who also played Wolsey, premiered music for the fifth act composed by Arthur Sullivan. The longest Broadway run the play has achieved was Herbert Beerbohm Tree's 1916 production, which ran 63 performances, with Lyn Harding as Henry and Tree as Wolsey. That production later toured, with Sydney Greenstreet taking over the title role.

• 7. Modern Revivals

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  Charles Laughton played Henry at Sadler's Wells Theatre in 1933, one of the notable twentieth-century revivals. In 1946, Margaret Webster directed the play as the inaugural production of her American Repertory Company on Broadway, with Walter Hampden as Wolsey and Eva Le Gallienne as Katherine. John Gielgud took the role of Wolsey at Stratford in 1959, with Harry Andrews as the King and Edith Evans as Katherine.

  The reconstructed Shakespeare's Globe staged the play from the 15th of May to the 21st of August 2010, as part of its first season devoted entirely to Shakespeare's history plays. The production recreated the cannon fire at the same moment in the text as the original 1613 performance. The cast included Dominic Rowan as Henry, Ian McNeice as Wolsey, Kate Duchêne as Katherine, and Miranda Raison as Anne, with Raison also appearing as Anne Boleyn in another production running in the same season.

  That production travelled to the Folger Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., where it ran from the 12th of October to the 28th of November 2010. There it gained a puppeteer-narrator named for Henry VIII's jester, Will Sommers, played by Louis Butelli, along with the character of Mary I, played by Megan Steigerwald. A remount also played at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 2012. In 2019, Canada's Stratford Festival staged the play in repertory; the production was filmed by Cineplex for theatrical broadcast and also aired on CBC.